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“... of Thatcherism as its policies have unfolded. Moreover, the 1987 report throws important light on the Conservatives’ success in recovering sufficiently from their mid-term doldrums in 1985 to achieve victory in 1987. It was not based upon growing support for the policies of Thatcherism, but reflected individuals’ perception of an improvement in ...”

“... follow the homecoming of men for whom home no longer exists. Edric’s latest novel, In Zodiac Light, revisits similar terrain. Set in the City of London Mental Hospital, Dartford, its protagonist is the poet-composer Ivor Gurney, who was a patient there from December 1922 until his death from tuberculosis 15 years later. Edric’s fascination with lives ...”

“... the phylloxera epidemic. Sparkenbroke is about the life and death of a creative aristocrat. Lewis Alison, the hero of The Fountain, is with the Naval Brigade defending Antwerp in 1914, and is interned in Holland. This had been Morgan’s own experience, and both he and his hero spent a quiet war on parole at a Dutch castle. Morgan occupied himself chiefly in ...”

“... Hunt. Another woman in the village, accused of fornication, was named as ‘Gwladus, otherwise Alison’. But this cross-cultural flux was under threat. A few years after the visitation, a legal dispute involving the Welsh nobleman Owain Glyn Dŵr got out of hand: he named himself Prince of Wales, assembled an army and burned down the town of ...”

“... on late 19th-century writings about ‘the nature of gender and human sexual response’, as Alison Hennegan has done in a recent essay,* you come to a rather different conclusion. Hennegan revels in the subversions of normality which colour the literature of the period and which, although checked by the outcome of the Wilde trial, were never stamped out ...”

“... status was uppermost in Tincknell’s mind as he led me, together with his head of communications, Alison Dykes, through freshly landscaped grounds – hardwood decking, raised flowerbeds, gravel pathways – towards the sales suite, pointing out on the way a scale model of the power station about the size of the average family home. ‘Isn’t it ...”

“... modest invalid knew enough to know that she was living in an age of prescientific ferment. One of Alison Winter’s main points in Mesmerised is that, in an age when so much of what was being discovered seemed extraordinary, a belief in the widely attested mesmeric phenomena was no more fanciful than a belief in electricity. The history of mesmerism, or ...”

“... could hope for. If her paintings are ‘quintessentially postwar’, as the show’s curator, Jane Alison, puts it, then that seems again to have more to do with surface texture than with subject. Visiting a Mondrian retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1955, Themerson wrote that she remembered the ‘old, withered woman who was sitting there in the ...”

“... to avoid the tendency of ceramics shows to treat their subject as hobby-craft, is mercifully light on the details of glazes and firing temperatures. What is important to understand is the extent to which Rie invented not only new forms but an original way of working that suited her both aesthetically and practically. It was a technique rapid enough to ...”

“... but I kept returning to the website, and I let the computer do its thing: the green recording light above my screen switched on and I could see myself projected into the gallery as visitors paced below. I was the watcher watched, watching myself being watched – a delirious mise en abyme.There’s nothing unfamiliar about remote video monitoring: it’s ...”

“... Radical candour was a point of principle; not to speak his mind was out of the question. Alison Garnham and Susi Woodhouse, surmising that there was never a time when he wasn’t like this, quote in their biography of Keller a wonderful fan letter he wrote aged sixteen to his idol, the violinist Bronislaw Huberman, after a concert, to the effect ...”

“... observes, an unacknowledged arm of the Foreign Office. Garlake quotes a letter, first brought to light in Frances Donaldson’s history of the British Council, in which a member of the Foreign Office admitted that the Cold War ‘is in essence a battle for men’s minds’ and that ‘the British Council is one of our chief agencies for fighting it.’ From ...”

“... else in A Vision is symbolic, close enough to apocalyptic literature to be irradiated by its light, the 13th Cycle is merely imaginary, too distant to be much more than the idiosyncrasy of a mind which could apprehend conflict in terms far richer than it could ever apprehend unity. It is at this point that Yeats’s occult belief passes into his social ...”

“... Like Professor Ehrlich, Nancy Reich, in her thorough biography of Clara Schumann, throws new light on the position of women in music. The status of the German musician is underlined in the portrait of her father, Friedrich Wieck, a prosperous piano teacher, and family patriarch of an uninviting kind. His plan for his talented daughter was not dissimilar ...”

“... But there were other things at stake here too. Reading Banham’s book, or the essays by Alison and Peter Smithson later collected as Ordinariness and Light, with its epigraphs from Aneurin Bevan, or the various texts of Team 10, the international corresponding group that included most early Brutalists, it is clear ...”